Monday, August 4, 2008

SaaS Trend in Ecommerce

A recent study by Gartner has revealed that 90% of Ecommerce sites will utilize SaaS by 2013 as reported in this article from ebizQ. The results of the study indicate that Ecommerce sites will use at least one of the following services: product reviews, product recommendations, or social sales capabilities. A statement from Gartner to ebizQ announced that:

“The trend toward SaaS applications has affected customer relationship management (CRM) and other applications, and e-commerce isn’t exempt from this trend. E-commerce SaaS solutions enable companies that couldn’t afford e-commerce to have these capabilities and compete online. It provides organizations with live Web sites, and enables e-commerce SaaS service providers to provide individual services, such as product reviews or click to call, that can be incorporated into e-commerce SaaS platforms, as well as on sites that are using licensed software.”

Gene Alvarez, research VP for Garnter, cautions Ecommerce companies to investigate before jumping to use SaaS tools. According to him it is very important for organizations to

“develop a SaaS strategy that accounts for the scoping, evaluation, selection, operation and different architectures or SaaS solutions, as well as determines the organizations comfort level in leveraging externally provided IT applications.”

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